Game Design, Programming and running a one-man games business…

Category: gratuitous space battles

Gratuitous Parasites

Posted on July 29, 2011

The next expansion pack for GSB is taking a while, because I’m so busym, but I did get time to at least finalise ONE of the ships in the new race. This is the Parasite Anthozoa Cruiser

Some of todays achievements!

Posted on July 27, 2011

An edited list of stuff I checked off my list today:

  1. Added the ‘100,000 copies sold’ text to the GSB website.
  2. Implemented the new menu/GUI (non-battle) music for GTB.
  3. Carried out a major rethink and rebalancing of the way weapons work in GTB, with some research, and a lot of code changes.
  4. Changed the way the AI accrues supplies in ‘classic’ TD mode. It now gets them over time just like the player.
  5. Implemented new green grassy textures.
  6. Checked the performance of the new AI code.
  7. Changed all weapons so there are more shots, doing less damage per shot, and longer durations for beam lasers.
  8. Added a new, obvious drop-unit effect to show when the AI has placed a new turret.
  9. Made fog of war an option, at least for me when I’m debugging, and probably for singleplayer too.
  10. Fixed bug where the AI kept trying to put new troops on top of existing ones in a trench.
  11. Fixed bug where the AI never replaced destroyed turrets.
  12. Managed to not get sidetracked into finishing off the ships for the GSB ‘parasites’ expansion :D

Not bad for the first day back after holidays.  I also riskily (some might say) threw some of my savings at the stock market buying shares in renishaw, a company I’ve bought and sold before, whose profits just jumped, and yet the share price dived 10%. That looked like a buying opportunity to my eyes. Fun fun…

 

 

The unthinkable? GSB micro-transactions? or…?

Posted on June 24, 2011

I had plans to do another GSB expansion pack, with a new race, much like the Nomads.

And then….

GTB has basically taken over. Combine it with ShowMeTheGames (which isn’t getting enough attention as it is) plus lots of home-life related building-stuff, and I just am not getting enough sleep. But I do have

  • Lots of GSB players
  • An artist willing to make new GSB ships.

I like to maintain control of stuff, so farming out DLC production to someone else is probably a ‘no’ right now. The thing is, the time taken to make new damage textures, new weapons, balance them, and do the whole package would be a bit of a nightmare.

So I was thinking, especially on this day that Team Fortress 2 goes ‘Free To Play’, that maybe micro-transactions are the future, and I should just leap into the market for them with GSB. I could get new ship hulls made, and designed, and have them sold as mini-DLC. Of course, the problem there is that there are minimum credit-card fees that I get charged, so anything below $4 is basically a disaster in terms of profit, making the whole thing unviable.

So I am scratching my chin thinking how viable it is to just do a bunch of extra base-race ships for GSB and sell them as a $4 mini-DLC booster pack. New federation, alliance, rebel and empire ships, by the original artist. That would take fairly minimal work, compared to the design of a whole new race. But would it make any sense? would there be a market for it?

Would you pay $4 for a bunch of new ships? I know a lot of people would not be interested, but there don’t have to be thousands of people for it to break even.

Awesome Gratuitous space battles mod

Posted on June 15, 2011

Check this out, it’s just great :D It’s a big, heavy duty mod for GSB:

The full forum thread for the mod is here:

http://positech.co.uk/forums/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=23&p=48689#p48671

basically it adds BIGGER ships (dreadnoughts) to the game, which is awesome, and something that any hardcore GSB player should probably take the time to check out. I love this sort of stuff happening to the game, especially now that I’m 100% in next game mode, and don’t have time to tweak GSB or add anything new right now. It is effectively new, fresh and free content for newcomers to the game, and all done by GSB players without any input from me.

It does seem that modding is less widespread than it used to be. Maybe big budget PC games are too hard to mod now, or maybe the developers and less supportive? who knows. It certainly reminds me that I need to ensure I make time to make my next game just as moddable as GSB is.

Possibly no work can get done this thursday / friday. My home office is getting a much-needed new roof, and I will be laptop bound for that time. I hope it doesn’t rain when the roof is half-off :(